What’s causing this global glut? Probably a mix of factors. Population growth is slowing worldwide, and for all the hype about the latest technology, it doesn’t seem to be creating either surging productivity or a lot of demand for business investment. The ideology of austerity, which has led to unprecedented weakness in government spending, has added to the problem. And low inflation around the world, which means low interest rates even when economies are booming, has reduced the room to cut rates when economies slump.

Whatever the precise mix of causes, what’s important now is that policy makers take seriously the possibility, I’d say probability, that excess savings and persistent global weakness is the new normal.

My sense is that there’s a deep-seated unwillingness, even among sophisticated officials, to accept this reality. Partly this is about special interests: Wall Street doesn’t want to hear that an unstable world requires strong financial regulation, and politicians who want to kill the welfare state don’t want to hear that government spending and debt aren’t problems in the current environment.

Once again, with interest rates at rock bottom, Republicans refuse to invest in government spending so they can privatize and profitize as much infrastructure as possible (which is the real problem), and they’re shocked that years of Austerity Bombing hasn’t created utopia yet (ask Kansas how that’s going.)

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Zandarhttps://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgZandar2015-08-24 08:45:092015-08-24 08:45:09Turn The Machines Back On

I’ll guess that the main reason for austerity mongering is the wish to slash government budgets in order to convert the savings into tax cuts for the wealthy. This will be repeated over and over and over until we reach the stage where everyone who’s not rich is paying taxes directly to those who are rich in the hopes that, somehow, someday, the rich will use those tax dollars to create a job or two.

For all his faults, and they are too numerous to contemplate let alone mention or list, Trump can very occasionally latch onto a piece of pragmatic progressiveness that is counter to GOP orthodoxy. And when those turn out to be applause lines at his gatherings, one can hear Grover Nordquist’s sphincter pucker from here.

I don’t think it matters whether Trump is sincere (and of course he’s not). I think it’s very helpful for him to pound on things like the outrageous sweetheart deal on hedge fund taxes. It gets the issue out there, and will provide a bipartisan color when the Biden and Warren ticket pushes it in the general election. (OK, that last clause was just shameless trolling; forgive me.)

THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/21/15
Rising Democratic star puts Rand Paul on early defense
Rachel Maddow shares video of a recent speech by Adam Edelen, Democratic Kentucky auditor of public accounts, and shows how his evident political potential has Rand Paul and Kentucky Republicans already afraid for Paul’s Senate reelection

The usual suspects will of course blame Obama for failing to deregulate everything to let the markets thrive… ignoring the fact that the markets themselves are incapable of thriving on their own at the moment and that past history – the panics of the 19th century, the Great Depression, others – shows that government intervention and regulation would stabilize said markets to return to growth.

The wealthy finally managed to convince everyone that low interest rates are a good thing. This means they don’t really have to do anything in order to maintain their status. A higher interest rate would have required them to keep investing their money in order to keep their savings from becoming worth less and less.

@Belafon: it’s inflation that forces wealth holders to do something with their money. Usually high interest rates are demanded in the context of inflationary pressure precisely because of the effect you mention.

High interest rates by themselves, though, are a sure-fire way to choke an economy to death.

@Belafon: I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make any sense to me. The rich want higher interest rates because that is where they generate their income. We have had more than one report (courtesy of Kthug) that they are the force behind pressuring the Fed to raise rates. Now if you meant low inflation, that makes more sense. Would you clarify?

“They’re paying nothing. And it’s ridiculous. I want to save the middle class. You know, the middle class—the hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”

This, in fact, makes more sense than most anything that’s been said in the campaign so far. Let’s ask Senator Schumer how Trump is wrong about this.

He’s been very reluctant to connect the dots between inequality and the global savings glut, as obvious as those dots ought to be. I can kind of understand his point- he says he wants especially solid evidence for something that’s so pleasing to his political ideology- but the connection seems awfully obvious to me. Fortunately, the solution is obvious, if politically difficult, too.

@Rex Tremendae: Even if you are on the brink of retirement, you should have enough cash on hand to last a year or two. The standard minimalist strategies of dollar-cost-averaging and rebalancing work well in a volatile market. Just keep doing them.

Back in the days of the dot.com boom, my friend invested in that stock, almost totally. Then when the dot.com bust happened, his broker allowed him to sell everything at the bottom of the market. Went from rich to poor in that single authorized set of transactions.

Now selling off inherited family keepsakes, trying to hustle real estate, which did well at first, but then 2008 came around.

Never sell when things are in the shitter. Corning glass was way up building fibreoptic cables, plunged in the dot-com bust, but is still a good company, came back with the general economy. But if you sold it at the bottom, you lost any chance to recover those losses.

Buy low – right now! If you have money market funds, use them to buy equities. Or anything equal to cash you can invest in stocks. Like a vacation fund…

@Rex Tremendae: The average Republican primary voter would have no problem rounding up all the “hedge fund guys”, lining them up against a wall, and dispatching them in a cruel, yet efficient manner. The problem is that they’d have no problem doing this to lots of other groups of people as well.

@WereBear: Also, he means the Chinese. Middle-class Chinese have accumulated excess savings in banks run by the government and– since the huge growth in China has been in finance and manufacturing, rather than consumption– no place for individuals to spend their savings.

@Rex Tremendae: I have the attitude that the last 20% of gains are not mine anyway, so if they go away it is easy come easy go. I think I might pause at more than 20% losses in this correction. But I might decide to sock in more cash at that level.

@Derelict:
I think it’s exactly the opposite. Sure, there are a few rich guys who want to get their knife and fork and dig into every source of government money, but they’re riding a vastly, vastly larger movement. That movement wants to gut everything they think is welfare, and when ‘austerity’ or ‘the deficit’ comes up, that’s the first and usually the only thing that’s pushed for. They want to cut welfare because they seethe with resentment that brown people are getting help. This is true in Europe as well as in America, but they’re not as desperate and insane about it. They didn’t just elect a black president.

Remember, in general increased government spending helps the rich, because they get a chunk of it.

@Keith G:
I think the love that poor conservatives supposedly have for the rich is much exaggerated. The rich have been their allies in telling liberals to fuck off, and removing all restraints on the rich satisfies Cleek’s Law. There’s some Prosperity Gospel going on, but they also know that a lot of big businesses are shafting them. That just traditionally hasn’t been as important as sticking it to blacks. They have no problem with Trump giving them open racism AND villainizing the worst parasites.

@Frankensteinbeck: So far, in Europe the austerians have actually had more power and caused more damage than the US. Maybe in part because they had more of a social-welfare system to cut in the first place.

(This is, in fact, the best argument I can see against having an extensive government social safety net: the jerks who don’t want it to exist will slash it the moment they get into power, causing massive short-term disruption. But it’s sort of a “heckler’s veto” argument.)

@Frankensteinbeck: Rural white conservatives hate Wall Street, and I mean HATE it. However, any hatred they may feel towards East Coast financiers is tempered by their even greater hatred of Liberals and any racial, ethnic, or religious group that is not exactly like them. Someone here once commented that Donald Trump is the North American Eva Peron, and they were kind of right. Watch out, America.

It’s not just the rich. A lot of that money is managed by institutions, including government entities like sovereign wealth funds. One of the responses to the Asian Currency Crisis was that a lot of developing countries decided to have big dollar (and later euro) reserves to protect themselves against a repeat. That kind of institutional savings is at least as much a cause of the global savings glut as wealthy individuals.

Remember, in general increased government spending helps the rich, because they get a chunk of it.

I think that the very rich generally want power over people, and that in overall hedonic terms, they are helped more by widespread poverty (which gives them a cheaper and more desperate source of lackeys) than by actually having more money. And they know it.

Increased government spending on “private finance initiatives” ensures that an even bigger share of tax money goes to the right private hands. The demands of profit and executive salaries mean something must be squeezed, so labor is outsourced and corners are cut. Quality and availability of service drop but the government can claim the service is saved by increased efficiency.

@TG Chicago: Slate notes that Trump is using the populist things that not-rich conservative voters actually favor – and they hated the bank bailouts of 2008 more than anyone, because they hate the bankers ( most days).

I suspect that Trump could not actually get a change of the carried interest tax break through either house of Congress, but that is just a quibble at this point, to his fans. [It would require many GOP reps breaking their vows to Grover Norquist. Not gonna happen.]

Problem with Trump is that it is becoming very obvious he is an ignorant blowhard who doesn’t know much of anything about how the real world works outside of resort and C a $ ee n o deals, and how to work the bankruptcy laws.

Last week he revealed that he does not seem to understand how NATO works, and specifically how Ukraine in NATO would impact the crisis there. So, war with Russia because Trump doesn’t understand NATO would be fun, huh?

Today I woke up to the radio news blaring nonsensical Trumps quotes on how a (so far) minor stock market correction in China amounted to them ‘calling the tune’ and ‘outsmarting us’ in running the world economy.

I don’t know that I expected anything better, but the horrifying specifics of Trump’s ignorance and delusion are becoming clear. I’ll have to change the wake up alarm to ‘air horn’ since will be less jarring that waking up to pointless Trump quotes, and why were that gasbag’s nonsense on financial markets important to put in national news headlines anyway?

it is becoming very obvious he is an ignorant blowhard who doesn’t know much of anything about how the real world works

Flush Limbaugh, Hannity and several metric tons of other right-wing gasbags have had long and lucrative careers in that situation. Ignorance is not a handicap with their audience, what matters is loud and aggressive delivery.

After marinating in right-wing media for decades, the Repuke base now have a presidential candidate who gives them the same rage-satiating dog and pony show with the same rabid rhetoric. It’s a natural progression.